Victor Serge (December 30, 1890 – November 17, 1947), born Victor Lvovich Kibalchich, was a Russian writer, poet, Marxist revolutionary and historian. Originally an anarchist, he joined the Bolsheviks five months after arriving in Petrograd in January 1919 and later worked for the Comintern as a journalist, editor and translator. He was critical of the Stalinist regime and remained a revolutionary Marxist until his death. He was a close supporter of the Left Opposition and associate of Leon Trotsky. According to William Giraldi, Serge's novels may be "read like an alloy of" George Orwell and Franz Kafka: "the uncommon political acuity of Orwell and the absurdist comedy of Kafka, a comedy with the damning squint of satire, except the satire is real." In his studies of Serge, Richard Greeman described him as a Modernist writer influenced by James Joyce, Andrei Bely and Freud; Greeman also believed that Serge, although writing in French, continued the experiments of such Russian Soviet writers as Isaac Babel, Osip Mandelstam and Boris Pilnyak and poets Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergei Yesenin. He is remembered as the author of novels and other prose works, memoirs (e.g. Memoirs of a Revolutionary) and poetry. Among his novels chronicling the lives of Soviet people and revolutionaries and of the first half of the 20th century, the best-known is The Case of Comrade Tulayev. Nicholas Lezard calls the novel " of the great 20th-century Russian novels" that follows the traditions of "Gogolian absurdity".

Early life

Serge was born in Belgium to Russian revolutionaries in exile. He had little formal schooling and left home in his teens. He lived in a French mining village, worked as a typesetter, and went to Paris. While in Paris he became an anarchist and editor of one of the movement's newspapers. During that time he was caught up in the trial of the Bonnot Gang with his then-wife Rirette Maîtrejean and others. Some of the accused were executed, the women were acquitted and Serge was sentenced to five years imprisonment for refusing to testify. He was 22 years old at the time of his sentencing and was released in 1917. In 1919 he arrived in revolutionary Russia during the civil war between the Red (revolutionary) and White (counter-revolutionary) armies. While concerned that the Bolsheviks were repressing opposition to their left, he later wrote, "Even if there was only one chance in a hundred for the regeneration of the revolution and its workers' democracy, that chance had to be taken".

Emigration and death

Serge was arrested in 1928, shortly after Leon Trotsky, with whom he had sometimes associated, and confined to Leningrad until 1933, a time in which his second wife Liouba Roussakov began to suffer from mental illness. Following international pressure on the USSR over its treatment of writers and other cultural figures in the Moscow trials, Serge was expelled from the USSR in 1936 and left for Belgium and France, where he returned to Paris. Roussakov came with him, as did their son Vlady, but Roussakov was institutionalized in 1937, following the move to Paris. Serge met the Italian-born archaeologist Laurette Séjourné. Upon the German invasion of France in 1941, Serge decided to leave Europe, seeking passage to the United States, where he could not obtain a visa. He accepted passage for Mexico despite having heard of Trotsky's recent assassination there. He took an oceanliner for Mexico (sharing a passage with Claude Levi-Strauss and Andre Breton), with Séjourné joining him in 1942. They married that year, but in Mexico Serge was beset with fear of arrest or assassination and struggled to work. He died in 1947 and was buried in Mexico City.

Works available in English

Fiction

Poems

Non-fiction: books

Non-fiction: collections of essays and articles

Non-fiction: pamphlet

Sources: British Library Catalogue and Catalog of the Library of Congress.

Sources